1. Bridging Concepts and Practice in
eScience via Simulation-driven
Engineering
Rafael Ferreira da Silva1, Henri Casanova2, Ryan Tanaka2, Frédéric Suter3
https://wrench-project.org
1 USC Information Sciences Institute, Marina del Rey, CA, USA
2 Information and Computer Sciences, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI, USA
3 IN2P3 Computing Center, CNRS, Villeurbanne, France
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2. Disconnect between theoretical and practical works
Theoreticians produce
results that are never used
by practitioners
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Practitioners use approaches that
may be vastly suboptimal because
they are not informed by any theory
One of the reasons for this disconnect is that theoretical work must be
done using formally defined models of computation
Ideally, these models are complete enough to be relevant to practice, but
simple enough that obtaining theoretical results (e.g., optimality results,
complexity bounds) is tractable

3. Real-world experiments are limited
One is limited to particular platform configurations (and sub-configurations)
How can “what if?” scenarios be explored?
How can generality be claimed?
One is limited by specifics of the software infrastructure that impose
constraints on CI application executions
Modifying complex software stacks (often written by others) just to test out ideas is not
feasible
In the end, the scope of real-world experiments is limited, which impedes
progress / discovery
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4. Simulation
When one works in an experimental field in which experiments are
problematic, one resorts to simulation
Physicists have understood this decades ago :)
In some fields of Computer Science simulation is a standard research and
development methodology
e.g., Networking, Computer Architecture
Several simulators and simulation frameworks have been developed for
parallel and distributed computing
Some of them developed explicitly for workflows
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5. Simulation-driven
engineering life cycle
Experimental
simulation
Research
idea
Evaluation of
simulation
results
Research
product
Implementation
onto CI platform
Design of
research
solution
unsatisfactory results
Accurate CI
simulator
Design of CI
simulator
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The ability to define
parameterizable services is key for
developing accurate CI simulators,
from which research products
evaluated via experimental
simulation could be seamlessly
integrated into actual CI platforms

6. The SimGrid framework
SimGrid is a research project
Development of simulation models of hardware/software stacks
Models are accurate (validated/invalidated) and scalable (low computational complexity, low
memory footprint)
SimGrid is open source usable software
Provides different APIs for a range of simulation needs, e.g.:
S4U: General simulation of Concurrent Sequential Processes
SMPI: Fine-grained simulation of MPI applications
SimGrid is versatile scientific instrument
Used for (combinations of) Grid, HPC, Peer-to-Peer, Cloud, Fog simulation projects
First developed in 2000, latest release: v3.23.2 (July 2019)
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https://simgrid.org

7. SimGrid’s philosophy
SimGrid’s philosophy: provide low-level abstractions
Advantage: you can do anything with it
Drawback: implementing a simulation of a complex system is a lot of work
Critical analysis:
In [Kecskemeti et al.’14] pinpoints exactly the above trade-off:
"SimGrid is more scalable and validated than competing frameworks, but just too much
work when wanting to simulate a WMS that interacts with CI components"
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https://simgrid.org

8. The WRENCH simulation framework
Objective #1: Make it easy to develop simulators of complex CI
application executions
Done by providing high-level, reusable simulation abstractions
Objective #2: Produce accurate and scalable simulations
Done by building on SimGrid
Let’s look at an example system one can simulate with WRENCH…
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wrench-project.org

9. System to simulate
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10. WRENCH core services
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Simulation core
All necessary simulation models and base
abstractions (computing, communicating,
storing), provided by SimGrid
Simulated core CI services
Abstractions for simulated CI
components to execute
computational workloads
Compute Services
Provide mechanisms for
executing application tasks,
which entail I/O and
computation
cloud
bare-metal virtualized cluster
batch-scheduled cluster
Storage Services
Store application files, which
can then be accessed in
reading/writing by the
compute services when
executing tasks that
read/write files
File Registry Services
Databases of key-value pairs
of storage services and files
replicas
Network Proximity Services
monitor the network and
maintain a database of host-
to-host network distances
Workflow Management
System
Provides the mechanisms for
executing workflow
applications, including
decision-making for
optimizing various objectives

11. WRENCH’s impact on
CI research
Accuracy: the ability to capture the
behavior of a real-world system with
as little bias as possible
Scalability: the ability to simulate
large systems with as few CPU cycles
and bytes of RAM as possible
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Empirical cumulative distribution function of task
completion times for sample real-world (“pegasus” and
“workqueue”) and simulated (“wrench”) executions.
Simulation Accuracy and Scalability

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# cores
PowerConsumption(W)
● estimation real wrench
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# cores
EnergyConsumption(KWh)
● estimation real wrench
WRENCH’s impact on
CI research
Investigated the impact of resource
utilization and I/O operations on
the energy usage, as well as the
impact of executing multiple tasks
concurrently on multi-socket,
multi-core compute nodes
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Comparison of power (left) and energy (right) consumption
measurements for a real-world application (“real”) using a
well-known model from the literature (“estimation”) and
our WRENCH model (“wrench”)
Energy-aware Computing

13. WRENCH
Pedagogic Modules
Simulation-driven self-contained
pedagogic modules supported by
WRENCH-based simulators
Activities entail running, through a
Web application, a simulator with
different input parameters
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https://wrench-project.org/wrench-pedagogic-modules

14. Thank You
Questions?
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This work is funded by NSF contracts #1642369 and #1642335; by CNRS
under grant #PICS07239; and partly funded by NSF contracts #1923539
and #1923621.
https://wrench-project.org